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The stuff of dreams and legends: Potato Flour

I have been in the dark on an amazing gluten free secret. It’s a fact so simple, so perfectly natural, so logical, so obvious that it is impossible how obscure it seems. It’s unbelievable! And I’m about to share that secret with all of you! Potato flour is not worthless. Yeah. I’m sure you didn’t know that (I apologize for all the unnecessary suspense and anticipation if you actually did know that). I definitely didn’t know that until a few short weeks ago.

I’ve had these gigantic jars of potato flour sitting around for years. A friend bought them and didn’t know what to do with them, so being recently gluten free, I appropriated them thinking I would find something to do with them in my culinary explorations through this strange, new gastronomical frontier. However, I found the flour to be impractical. I’d add it to my gluten free blends only to have baked goods come out dense and chewy or incredibly hard and with the flavor of dog biscuits. It was horrible. I stopped experimenting with it completely. So I’ve just been carrying this load of flour from place to place because I liked the big glass jars that contain it and I didn’t have anything else to fill them.

Well the other week I was down to my last little bit of rice flour and just a dash of millet and I was looking to do some deep frying. And there they were. Those two big, beautiful jars of potato flour. Finding myself in a pinch, I went ahead and threw potato flour into the mix.

I have discovered the single best purpose for potato flour. It makes me giddy, almost mad, how ridiculous it is. And It’s not throwing it away either. It’s flouring. Yeah. You use potato flour for flouring. Incredible, right? My new favorite thing to do with potato flour is to dredge a bunch of julienned potatoes in it and deep fry them. Potato floured fried potatoes. Redundant? Never! Ingenious! Delicious! It makes the perfect crust. It’s potato flavored. I can’t get over it. And it seems to resist burning. It just gets nice and golden brown. Even the bits of flour debris that get left in the oil don’t burn over several batches of fries. I’ll be posting plenty of recipes utilizing this amazing new discovery soon, including the official potato floured french fry recipe. Stay tuned for all the crazy potato flour worship!